Can you imagine going to see humans from different cultures on display? That is precisely what people would do in the 1800s and early 1900s when they visited human zoos or ethnic villages to see people such as Indigenous Americans, West Africans, Samoans and Inuit in their “natural” state. The 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago hosted such an attraction. One of the groups on display were Jews who made up 80% of the inhabitants of the Turkish village.

The manager of the Turkish Village was Robert Levy whose company received the concession to mount this attraction. Most of the clerks, actors, servants, musicians and dancers in the village were Jews who, on Yom Kippur, turned the life size model of a Turkish mosque into a synagogue where........

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